Looking forward to the next one as I still don't know what to do with a "slackbuild." You said one or two days but no hurry here as I am waiting for 7.1, but then will want to get strigi or neomuk or akonadi or something like that running which will constantly index my hard drive. Perhaps this will also allow me to configure yate properly. Wow. What power!

We really don't use that any more to create packages. it's all automated now via a buildbot.

That generates some confusion..so although you do not have any interest in the packages an individual may create for Vector, could an individual make a package from ie free code and use it on vector 7.0 or 7.1 with this knowledge of sbbuilder? and does that imply there will be no support.. available for personal use only? and lastly will sbbuilder continue to be available in the repository?

You can definitely use sbbuilder to create packages for personal user... sbbuilder simply tries (and does very well) to generate a build script that will build the package for you.

Using a combination of sbbuilder + buildbot for automated builds offers several advantages over contributed binary packages from users. Using the automated builds we can get re-producible results. Because packages are built on a clean environment, we eliminate the possibility of hosting bad packages with un-necessary dependencies. Also, because the build scripts are kept in a version control system, package updates are as simple as changing one line on the build script. One more and I can't emphasize how cool this one is, making a new release of the distro is just a matter of editing a few text files to produce new packages and begin the testing phase.